Air Quality and Climate

Air Quality and Climate

Dust storms in the Southwest U.S. and northern Mexico continue to be a serious health and safety issue. This project aims to locate the sources of dust that have impacted people in southwestern New Mexico, northwestern Chihuahua, and west Texas. Researchers continued surveillance of dust storms and determined the latitude and longitude of each event. To better understand the characteristics of the land surface from where the dust emission occurs, researchers identified more than 2,000 locations responsible for a dust plume as seen in satellite imagery and are in the process of understanding the state-of-the-land surface at those locations. Researchers also have started work to construct a synoptic climatology of these dust storms to increase their ability to forecast these events.